Astonishing Views of a Luminous, Bustling Planet

Astonishing Views of a Luminous, Bustling Planet By ANDREW C. REVKIN I encourage you to watch this beautifully produced selection of time-lapse imagery of the Earth recorded by the crew of the International Space Station between August and October. The video captures in equal measure the wonders of the physical planet — including the dancing auroras of both hemispheres — and the impressive luminosity of humanity in the midst of its fossil-fueled growth spurt. It is indeed a “very small stage in a vast cosmic arena,” as Carl Sagan wrote in 1994. But the stage is getting pretty populated. The raw video is available from the Image Science & Analysis Laboratory at NASA Johnson Space Center, but Michael König , a video maker based in Berlin, has added a nice soundtrack and used various techniques to clean up the imagery. In 2008, I wrote about similar images recorded by NASA as...